I was reading a book called “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself”, published just before the Civil War. The author is Harriet Jacobs.
Harriet was born a slave in 1813 on the Albemarle Sound in North Carolina, and she spent about 10 years trying to escape. When she finally did, and set up a new home in New York, she spent about 15 years rushing around trying to evade her former captors who kept coming north to try to recapture her. She would often flee to Massachusetts, where there were many vigilante committees that would protect escaped slaves.
So actually, the north wasn’t really “free”, she keeps writing in the book, because her own former slave-owners could just mosey on over and lay claim to her again. During all of these events, North Carolina banned teaching slaves to read and write (in 1831). Also in that year, mobs of white people I think all over Virginia and North Carolina started hunting and killing slaves randomly, and stealing and vandalizing houses, even of free Blacks, in response to Nat Turner’s uprising. Then in 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law was passed. This gave even stronger powers for recapturing escaped slaves, and places like Massachusetts were no longer safe.
Harriet Jacobs describes tons of slaves being murdered in horrible ways in North Carolina, and extreme ill-treatment. But all the while, journalists would come visit southern plantations and say, “oh, they’re so nice! and the slaves are so comfortable! and the slave-owners so benevolent! And the whole institution is such a blessing! And the slaves couldn’t take care of themselves anyways, so this is for the best!” On and on and on.
But even with all that propaganda, the cat was out of the bag. The brutality of slavery was being written and read about all over the place. Harriet Jacobs wrote about it in her own book, and other books, newspapers, and abolitionist texts were being published.
In 1850, the situation must have seemed so despairing, given everything was getting worse: the Fugitive Slave Law had been passed, and obstacles against literacy, and no justice at all. It must have felt like slavery was becoming more and more entrenched, and it may have been hard to think of it ever ending. But fifteen years later, the whole thing had collapsed. They had been all-powerful, and becoming more powerful, then lost anyways. I think it’s a nice thing to remember.
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